PhD Biologist and Educator

I am a recent PhD graduate from the Department of Biology at the University of Miami interested in the roles of symbiotic fungal networks on plant interactions and community structuring.

A second "half" of my PhD focused on implementing research-based education in underprivileged communities.

Today, as a post-doctoral associate, I focus on increasing diversity in the sciences and improving student learning in the sciences through inquiry-based teaching.

Recent News:

Miami-Dade High School students publish a paper on their work in DNA primers

As a part of my work in the education program at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, I organized and ran a high school internship program for Miami Dade High School Students. In collaboration with scientists at Florida International University and the Fairchild's volunteer scientists, we mentored students in conducting scientific research. The students ended the summer by writing up and publishing their findings on native Florida orchid microsatellite DNA primers that would ultimately be used in determining the population genetics of the two orchid species.

NSF grant featured at University of Miami

My research and recently won National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant was recently featured in the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences news website. See it here: http://www.as.miami.edu/news/news-archive/um-biology-phd-student-receives-dissertation-support-grant-from-national-science-foundation.html

NSF- DDIG project underway at Richmond Heights Middle!

Since acquiring the grant in June, the majority of the Fall 2014 semester has been spent preparing, gathering materials and setting up my DDIG experiment. I have enlisted the help of students from an Agri-science program at Richmond Heights Middle School, a title-1 school at which I worked as an NSF GK-12 fellow.

Students first learned about the role of mycorrhizas in plant nutrition by performing their own experiments on corn and broccoli. By growing plants with and without mycorrhizal fungi, they learned that the mycorrhiza relationship can be different for different plant species. They also learned about variables, hypotheses, measurements, and data. I also taught students how to take their recorded data and plot it in Microsoft Excel to illustrate the trends we were seeing in their treatments.

Following our first experiment, students then began helping me in the making of 1800 specialized cone-tainers and the set-up of 18 microcosms. These cone-tainers allow mycorrhizal fungi hyphae (filaments) to grow from the plant root system out of the cone-tainer to neighboring cone-tainers, thereby connecting plants in a microcosm through common mycorrhizal networks. Microcosms were completely set-up and seeded on December 8th, 2014 and they will remain in pre-treatment for two months.